Icd Products Case Study

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report was commissioned to examine the performance of ICD Products and its approach towards its sales and marketing, as well as the relation to the problems that the company is currently facing and had been facing over the past three years.  ICD Products is a well known and structured company in the industry of electromechanical control devices, but the company hasn’t been able to make good results in sales and has been showing a lack on bringing innovation to the products, and it’s losing its space in the market.

The objective of this report is to point out some changes and also to explain what the company should do and take into consideration in order to achieve better results and the implementation of a marketing strategy.

ICD PRODUCTS SALES AND MARKETING

Although ICD Products were the pioneer in the market, the company has been losing its space in the industry for several reasons, such as ICD Products does not have a marketing department; ICD Products has not introduced any new product into the market in a while, as opposed to its competitors; ICD Products prices are a lot higher than competitors; ICD Products does not have any kind of discount scheme or loyalty scheme; ICD Products sales force is made by only 12 people, focused on one single market (UK) and clearly not seeking for new opportunities, plus, salesforce people are mainly engineers, in other words, they have knowledge over the products, but they don’t have sales skills; ICD Products approach is not effective, focused on negative aspects among other issues.

MARKETING ORIENTATION AND MARKETING MIX

Marketing orientation is a business approach to how the company responds to the customer needs and then, creates products where the main goal is to rich the satisfaction of the consumer or yet, according to Narver and Slater ‘’marketing orientation is defined as " the organization culture that most effectively and efficiently creates the necessary behaviours for the creation of superior value for buyers and, thus, continuous superior performance for the business". The marketing mix is defined according to Kotler as "set of marketing tools that the firm uses to pursue its marketing objectives in the target market" and it is also known as the 4 Ps (product, price, promotion, and place).

ICD Products were created over 30 years ago and haven’t changed its philosophy and its way of thinking since then, which fundamentally is one of the reasons why the company is facing troubles now. The essence of ICD Products is to focus on product and production excellence, backed by strong technical sales support. The founder, Watkinson believed that if the product was right (well designed and manufactured to the highest level of quality) there would be a market.  Therefore, it is a different time for ICD Products now, and they should be thinking ahead on the development of new products to meet customers needs as well as becoming more competitive towards its competitors. Also, ICD Products should consider a new philosophy.

Now, a quick analysis of the 4Ps:

Product – The product that ICD Products offers is an electromechanical control device for the chemical industry. It is well designed and manufactured to the highest level of quality and excellence, but the company has a massive lack of innovation right now.

Price – ICD Products has fixed prices and no discount or loyalty scheme, and the company is aware of its high prices, especially when compared to its competitors. Salesforce has tried to suggest the implementation of a new price list, but the action did not succeed.

Place – The main location is the UK. ICD Products does not have the intention to expand, so the products are not extensively available.

Promotion – The company has never offered or focused on any kind of promotion, which is another reason for the failure.

Overall, the company possesses enormous potential to be at the same level as all the competitors, but changes are needed immediately.

THE PRODUCT LIFE-CYCLE

The product life-cycle is a theory propounded by the economist Raymond Vernon in 1966. The concept describes all the stages that a product goes through from the very beginning (research and development) until the very end when the product is no longer needed in the market.  ICD Products were developed over 30 years ago, but technology moves fast and new and better products are being launched by competitors all the time to satisfy the new necessities of the consumers. In order to keep ICD Products in the industry as well as increase revenue, ICD Products must invest in the development of new and more attractive products.